A NASA supercomputer produced an “eye-popping” 3-D animation showing how carbon dioxide moves through the atmosphere, billed by the space agency as a critical step for carbon-cycle science.

The 78-second animation combines data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and a high-resolution weather model to give an “unprecedented” view of how the critical greenhouse gas moved throughout the globe for a full year into September 2015. NASA says the new visualization, which was released on Tuesday, will help scientists answer key questions about the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by ecosystems, particularly on land, and whether land and oceans will continue absorbing emissions — or reach a saturation point.

Lesley Ott, a carbon cycle scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said scientists needs to better understand what’s driving the “carbon flux,” or the exchange of carbon dioxide through the atmosphere, land and ocean.

“We can’t measure the flux directly at high resolution across the entire globe,” Ott said. “We are trying to build the tools needed to provide an accurate picture of what’s happening in the atmosphere and translating that to an accurate picture of what’s going on with the flux. There’s still a long way to go, but this is a really important and necessary step in that chain of discoveries about carbon dioxide.”

The highest carbon dioxide concentrations are seen in the Northern Hemisphere during winter months, Ott told EcoWatch.com.

“Most of the human emissions originate from this region, but it also holds the majority of the world’s land masses and vegetation stocks, which decompose and release carbon during the winter,” Ott said.

“When plants start to grow again in the spring, you see massive amounts of carbon drawn out of the atmosphere, but not quite enough to balance out the increase from human emissions. If we ran the visualization for a longer time period, you would see the carbon dioxide released in the north mix with Southern Hemisphere air, but that inter-hemispheric mixing can take about a year. So even though that mixing is going on here, what really jumps out is the seasonal cycle of carbon dioxide.”

Nearly half of all human-caused emissions are absorbed by the land and ocean. Scientists currently believe that about 50 percent of emissions stay in the atmosphere, with about 25 percent absorbed by vegetation on land and another 25 percent by the ocean, according to NASA.

Launched in 2014, the OCO-2 is NASA’s first satellite designed specifically to track atmospheric carbon dioxide on a regional scale from space. Scientists had previously measured the rising concentration of carbon dioxide for decades using ground-based sensors.

“Since September of 2014, OCO-2 has been returning almost 100,000 carbon dioxide estimates over the globe each day,” said David Crisp, OCO-2 science team leader. “Modeling tools like those being developed by our colleagues in the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office are critical for analyzing and interpreting this high-resolution dataset.”